Inside Postmates's experimentation engine
How integrated customer data enables Postmates’ growth team to answer not only “the what” but also the “so what” – across product, marketing, and customer support
Postmates is transforming the way goods move around cities. Their revolutionary urban logistics platform connects customers with local couriers who can deliver anything from any store or restaurant in minutes, empowering communities to shop local instantly from the comfort of their home.
Problem
While many companies “do deliveries”, Postmates aimed to deliver something more: an exceptional customer experience.
But while their existing analytics tools could tell them what customers were doing with the service, they weren’t integrated across the different stages of the customer journey, and couldn’t drive decisions around how to improve. In order to improve customers’ experience, Postmates needed to gain a holistic understanding of their customers' journeys and the ability to run experiments quickly and efficiently off of connected data sets
Solution
Using mParticle, Postmates connected customer-level data across more than a dozen different systems.
The first step was ensuring that their data collection was robust from the point of origin. So, they installed mParticle’s SDK to collect event-level customer data across mobile and web, delivering the data from mParticle to their product analytics provider (Amplitude).
The foundation of any experimentation platform is the instrumentation that you have in place... You need to be able to understand what customers are doing in your product and how they're using it.
Lead Product Manager, Postmates
Postmates then built an experimentation framework on top of mParticle’s API, which they used to test hypotheses about how customers would interact with different product features and marketing promotions, and in turn understand the true business impact of these strategies.
With all the data connected, outcome metrics included not only order volume and value, but also customer satisfaction scores and repeat order volume and value (approximating lifetime value)
Results
With mParticle as the core customer data foundation, experimentation has become a core component of the Postmates growth team’s culture. The result has been a much more scientific approach to every product, marketing and customer service resource allocation decision and reduced risk of failure. As just one example, Postmates was able to introduce the signup flow optimizations to the courier registration process that generated a 20% lift in completions.
